How to Remove Menu Items Under Right-Click or Context Menu in Windows

I am in a bad habit of installing all sorts of applications that I think could be useful, not only this makes my system run slower, some of the applications add themselves to my right click context menu. Now each time I right click on any folder or file, it takes some time for the menu to load.

This seems really annoying, while most of the application asks whether the user want to add applications to their taskbar or desktop, but some of them don’t. So how do you take care of unwanted applications that end up on the context menu and adds up to load time?

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate a simple registry hack that would allow you to edit/remove any unwanted application, thus making your context menu cleaner and easier to load.

This hack is divided into two types; one is to remove programs from files context menu, while the other one is from folder context menu. But before you begin, make sure you have made a backup of the registry – here; this would help in case any thing goes wrong.

Edit right click menu for files

1. Go to Start Menu, and click on Run (if you are using Windows Vista, type run inside the search bar to open.)

2. Now enter; regedit and hit enter,

3. A Registry Editor will pop up on your screen,

4. Follow the path as shown below;

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\

5. Once you are inside the Context Menu Handler folder, you will see a list of folders that are being displayed on the context menu.

6. Choose any folder that you want to delete, there are two ways to delete a registry either you delete the folder by right clicking on it and then selecting delete from the drop down menu, or simply click the folder and on the right side of the pane, you’ll see a file, double click on it. A small window will open, it will contain some values as shown below;

Just append a ‘-‘ (minus sign without quotes) at the extreme left of the value. Click OK when you are done, Reference screen shot below;

This will remove the application from the file context menu. The reason we choose the second option is that you can bring back the same application that you have just removed, just by removing the minus sign.

Edit right click menu for Folders

Now if you want to remove the program from the Folder Context menu as well, you will have to follow a slightly different procedure,

Inside the Registry Editor, go to

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\

Under the ContextMenuHandler folder you will see a list of files that are on the context menu. Just follow the same procedure as mentioned above starting from step #6 and onwards.

Once you have done all this, restart your system for changes to take effect. Source